Why do you even need a homelab

• I strongly believe that tech and IT is more about doing stuff. There is so much fun in tinkering around with systems and setting up things from scratch.
• You kind of get the mastery from breaking and building stuff, which might have repercussions in most corporate job environments these days.
• Especially if you are SRE or DevOps engineer like me, reliability and quality are everything. It is exhilarating to have your own tech corner where you can set up and explore new technologies whatever and however you want. You can explore cutting-edge technologies without the onus of maintaining uptime.
• And the kind of exposure and knowledge that you get here can be used in work. Also, we get exposure to stuff that may be some other team's responsibility.
• And you can run your own services which can save money sometimes.
• It helps in validating questions or doubts in specific scenarios that can't be easily done in the work environment.

What are some of the cool things that can be run on homelab

• You can ditch the buggy unpatched dumb ISP routers for something much safer, concrete, and feature-rich Firewalls like PfSense, OPNSense, etc.
• Have your own media servers like Plex or JellyFin.
• Having your own NAS set up for all your storage needs instead of using cloud storages with recurring costs.
• Host your own websites.
• Run your own bots for apps like Discord.
• Host a Minecraft or other game server.
• You can set up Pi-hole for nuking the ad requests for the entire network at the DNS level.
• Running your own VPN server.
• You can run Nextcloud instead of GoogleDrive, OneDrive, or Dropbox.

I often get comments from folks who are interested in homelabbing that they are not sure what to experiment with in their homelab. For that, my answer is simple. You can basically run any service in homelab that you use on the internet on your own, instead of using other providers. It may be difficult and will have a steep learning curve, but that's what makes it fun.

Like one of my favorite YouTubers, Luke Smith used to say

Don't be a Web Peasant instead be an Internet landlord.